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Damage
At last, violence inflicted upon your foes! Sadly, there's some number-crunching to do first before your opponent is a heap of scrap metal (or possibly protoplasm) before you. Normal Damage DC translates to damage thusly: each 5 points of DC is (1d10 - 1) points of damage. Any leftover DC is (1d(DC*2) - 1) damage. The total damage is multiplied by 4 for Scale 1 (small mecha), or by 20 for Scale 2 (large mecha). *Area-effect attacks (SCATTER, BLAST, and LINE) are changed from 1 attack of N '' DC into ''N attacks of 1 DC, which each strike a random location. This is why blast-radius weapons strip armor from your foes, but rarely kill them unless you're dealing enough damage to reduce the entire mecha to scrap. *HYPER attacks hit every limb, head, and torso of the mecha. *ARMORIGNORE attacks simply ignore armor. They deal no damage to it, and their damage is not reduced by armor. *First, incoming attacks damage the armor. If there is external armor on the part being damaged (i.e., Class 8 Body Armor), the damage must go through the external armor first. **Each attack can only chip away at armor, even if damage penetrates it: personal-scale weapons only remove up to 2 armor, Scale 1 weapons up to 10 armor, Scale 2 weapons up to 50 armor. **Armor is damaged by randomly from 1 up to half of the damage of the incoming attack, to the cap mentioned above. **Armor which is rusty has several problems: it only stops half as much damage, always takes the maximum possible amount of damage from an attack (i.e., exactly half the damage of the attack), and there is no maximum to the amount of armor stripped by the attack. A large attack can completely destroy rusty armor in one hit. **BRUTAL weapons double their armor-stripping damage, which includes going over the armor-removal cap, and always do a minimum of 3 damage to armor. (This minimum damage is trivial for mecha, but devastating to personal armor.) *An incoming attack with a Penetration greater than 0 will ignore 25% of the armor for each point of Penetration, so a Penetration of 4 will ignore armor entirely, but stilldeal damage to the armor. If the incoming damage is greater than the armor value, the (original) armor value is subtracted from the damage, which is then inflicted on the structure of the part. Once the armor is ignored, 4 is subtracted from the Penetration. Since there are often multiple layers of armor on a mecha, a Penetration of 4 only gets you past the first layer. *If there is any remaining Penetration after the armor has been pierced, then it increases the damage by 20% per point. (Since ARMORIGNORE will have 10 or more points of Penetration, it will deal at least 300% of normal damage. Thankfully, there are only 2 creatures with this ability!) *Once damage has gotten past armor, there is a 1% chance that it will damage a random subcomponent (such as a weapon or sensor) directly. Damage will also go straight to subcomponents if the component does not have any hit points, such as storage containers and external armor. *If the full damage does not go to the subcomponent, there is a 1 in 3 chance that the damage will go half to the part being hit, and half to a random subcomponent. *Otherwise, the full damage goes to the part that was hit. *If ammunition is destroyed, then it does disgusting amounts of damage to the torso of the mecha as the rest of the ammo cooks off in a plasmariffic orgy of destruction. (To be exact: it creates a DC (weapon DC + shots remaining in clip) attack, which is applied as overkill damage. That 120-pack of Swarm Missiles is pretty much Instant Death if it's fully loaded when destroyed.) This only applies to ammo installed in the mecha, not ammo carried in its inventory; inventory items are a bit vulnerable (25% chance of concussion damage on every hit!), so they cannot explode. Concussion Damage The base concussion damage is the DC of the weapon, +3 for melee weapons and missiles, +7 for fists and feet, and divided by the size of the mecha. The damage dealt will be randomly between 0 and the base damage. Note that fists and feet usually have low DC, so you will often deal more concussion damage per hit with a missile salvo or a melee weapon. You will also destroy the enemy mecha much faster with missiles or melee weapons, so you will have a smaller chance of killing the pilot. Concussion damage bypasses armor. There is a 75% chance of dealing concussion damage to a mecha pilot. There is a 25% chance of dealing concussion damage to each item in the inventory of the mecha, or the character in personal combat. Overkill Damage If you blast the left wing off of a Wasp with a Heavy Laser Cannon, the remaining damage blasts the torso as a single large attack (regardless of the BV or area-effect nature of the original attack), though it must penetrate the torso armor first. "Storage" modules do not cause overflow damage to the torso; they blow off cleanly. As noted, BLAST attacks are divided into DC 1 attacks. Since all damage to a "dead" part is shunted to the torso, a DC 10 BLAST HYPER weapon that manages to destroy an arm in the 8th DC 1 hit will have the 9th and 10th attacks to that arm combined, and hit the torso instead (after penetrating any remaining shreds of armor on that arm), meaning the 9th and 10th "rounds" of damage will hit the torso twice. This is why BLAST HYPER weapons only leave twisted scrap behind: one or more limbs will be destroyed, magnifying any remaining damage to the torso. Special Damage Effects Overload Weapons Weapons that cause OVERLOAD will overheat your opponent's mecha if you hit, but first there is a defense roll of their Electronic Warfare skill against your Electronic Warfare skill. If you beat your opponent's roll, then you add the weapons DC, plus 1d(DC), plus (1/3 of the amount you beat your opponent's Electronic Warfare skill by), plus 5. In other words, a single hit by an OVERLOAD weapon isn't nearly enough to overload your opponent. An average roll when you barely beat your opponent with the largest OVERLOAD weapon available, the Superheavy Particle Cannon (DC 13, OVERLOAD) will cause 13 + 7.5 + 0 + 5 = 25 points of Overload. If your opponent isn't overloaded at all, then it will take 3-4 hits to overload them. If your opponent is already overloaded, then this will cause 2-3 more points of penalty to their MV and TR. Of course, by the time you can mount Superheavy Particle Cannons, you have much better weapons available to you, which can reduce some mecha to scrap in a few hits. Like most status ailments, this weapon is more effective when used against you than when used by you. When you're facing down a half-dozen mecha by yourself, who cares that one of them is overloaded? Poison, Burning, Rust, and Confusion If you fail your resistance roll (which is Electronic Warfare for mecha, and Resistance for personal combat) against their attack roll (again, Electronic Warfare for mecha, probably Resistance for personal combat), you gain the poison, burning, rusty, or confusion effect. Return to *Attack Sequence *Combat System -- hitting and missing, armor, weapon attributes, etc. *Guides -- strategy tips and tricks, game mechanics, plot spoilers